Dreams are universal yet highly idiosyncratic experiences. While memories and personal concerns are known to influence dream content, how such influences evolve over time and how stable individual traits shape dreaming remain unclear. Here, we systematically quantified the semantic structure of dreams in a large, multimodal dataset comprising 3366 reports of dreams and waking experiences...
Dear Editor, While there is a growing interest towards subconscious phenomena globally, experiences like lucid dreaming are under-researched in South Asia and remain largely unrecognized in Pakistan’s academic and clinical settings despite their widely acknowledged psychological significance. International studies have examined the association between lucid dreaming and psychopathology with...
Abstract During lucid dreaming, the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. In past years, numerous studies have explored the characteristics of lucid dreams, which link lucid dreams to vivid visual perception, positive emotions, and wake-like metacognition and executive functions. To determine brain network activity associated with the conscious experience during lucid dreaming, we analyzed...
Dreams have always contributed to religious consciousness and religions have always, in turn, shaped dream content (McNamara, 2016; Lanternari, 1975). Many religions began as literally a dream or vision in the mind of the founder. In the holy scriptures of the three Abrahamic Faiths dreams abound, with perhaps the dream called “Jacob’s ladder” being one of the most famous. The patriarch Jacob...
Dreams have long served as a bridge between human cognition and the sacred, offering spaces where the boundaries of self, culture, and spirituality are renegotiated. Across history, they have been regarded not only as private experiences but also as vehicles of prophecy, divine affirmation, and symbolic meaning that shape religious worldviews. Whether in theistic traditions, where dreams have...
Abstract This paper presents a first-person qualitative case study of an individual with extraordinarily high dream recall frequency, sustained high‑narrative dreaming, and unconscious creative dreaming—a rare and understudied phenotype in sleep and cognitive science. The participant (also the author) consistently experiences long, coherent, plot‑driven dreams with distinct characters,...
This preprint was submitted on 31 March 2026. The author confirms that the research content is authentic, accurate, and reliable. The author takes all legal and academic responsibility for content presented in this work.This paper presents a first-person qualitative case study of an individual with extraordinarily high dream recall frequency, sustained high‑narrative dreaming, and unconscious...
Scientific ReportsMarch 13, 2026Daniel Soares Brandão, Rafael N. B. Scott, Ernesto Soares et al.
Every studied animal species exhibits some form of sleep, a state evolved under the sustained influence of prey and predator behaviors. Dreams have been proposed to have evolved as offline mental simulations able to warn against impending threats from the environment, such as predators. To assess how the ecological roles of prey and predator interact with sleep and dreaming, we used a...
Sam Parnia's stated aim is "to synthesize the most important scientific discoveries and make them available to professionals and the general public alike" (p.5).Lucid Dying is written in a straightforward though repetitive manner, and the tenor of the book is one of earnest enthusiasm if not actually proselytizing.Parnia is well qualified to have an opinion on this topic, as he has been in the...
This chapter provides a detailed explanation for self-knowing (autonoetic) consciousness, based on the Multistate Hierarchical Model of Consciousness. This full statement of the theory makes it possible to explain more fully how autonoetic consciousness differs from dreaming, which is a form of noetic (fact-knowing) consciousness. The relationship between autonoetic consciousness and noetic...